.xyz is 1 year old!

1 year ago to the dot, the new domain for every website, everywhere, became globally available. Remember this?

It seems like just yesterday that we reset the internet and crashed several servers along the way. In true .xyz record-breaking fashion, we also recently crushed through another milestone.

Did you know that CentralNic – our trusty partner who handles the technical magic of .xyz – generates reports on how many times .xyz domains are accessed each month (also known as DNS queries)?

Well, with hundreds of thousands of active .xyz sites, a lot of people are accessing .xyz domains. And just how many? So many that we broke CentralNic’s reporting, which only counted up to 32-bit integers. That means, .xyz domains were accessed more than 2.1 BILLION times in January, causing a snafu in CentralNic’s reporting!

If this sounds familiar to anyone, that’s because the same thing happened to YouTube’s counter with the Gangnam Style music video. YouTube didn’t see Gangnam Style coming, the same way that the internet wasn’t prepared for .xyz’s rapid growth.